AC-ET Supplies Green Hippo to XL Video for The xx Tour

A.C. Entertainment Technologies (AC-ET) Ltd’s Video division has supplied the UK’s leading live music video rental company, XL Video, with two of the latest Green Hippo v3 HD i7 media servers, which have gone into immediate use on tour with 2010 Mercury Prize winning UK indie band, The xx.

The sale was co-ordinated by Peter Butler for AC-ET and Paul Wood, XL’s Project Manager for The xx tour. Peter also liaised closely with XL Video’s Technical Project Manager, James Morden.

The Hippotizers were specified by the band’s Lighting Director, Michael Straun and were specifically chosen as they were the only media servers able to fulfil the exact functionality and system requirements necessary.

Two of the Hippotizers are run live, while the third is used as a ‘hot’ backup - all running on the latest 3.1 version software.

Michael runs the Hippotizers completely live and improvised for the show. They are programmed up with HD video content deriving from the new xx album artwork, released in September.

The innovative lighting, set and visual design concept for The xx’s live shows is based on dynamic multi-dimensional video projections coming from different levels and angles of the room and stage.

Front projectors cover the whole of the stage and the band; rear projectors shoot forward from behind and up above the band, and there is a large 3D Perspex ‘X’ suspended above the stage, which is projected onto from both front and rear.

The Hippotizer i7s were selected for the tour primarily for their ‘Live Mask’ function, which allows very quick, accurate and flexible Alpha Masks to be drawn onto the output of both the Layers and the Master outputs.

This node-based mapping function can be instantaneously drawn and changed onto the output, and in this case, allows video projection content to be easily included or excluded on the X and the other surfaces on-the-fly – giving them a positive or negative X option when using both front and back projections.

The tour has included a wide variety of European festival dates.

As most of the other popular media servers don't currently offer a similar function to Live Mask, mapping the position of the X within the video content would have also been very difficult in the standard festival changeover timeframe, especially with the variety of projector positions offered on the road!

Michael is delighted with the i7s, which are also providing extremely reliable and smooth multi-layered HD playback.

Features being utilised include applying H/S/C effects to ensure the consistency of the visual look across various performance profiles.

AC-ET is the exclusive UK and Ireland distributor for Green Hippo products.